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Interview With The Creator of Napster on ZDnet
Carnage4Life writes, "Here's an interview with the creator of Napster on ZDnet where he talks about various issues including designing Napster, what plans he has for Napster and the growing number of bans on Napster in college campuses due to the fact that it is a bandwidth hog." Beyond the issue of "bandwidth hog," something that more colleges/unis are being threatened with is lawsuits from the recording industry because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. You'll be seeing some more on the DMCA from us this week.
Actually, you don't need VMWare: ;)
1) Upgrade to a recent version of WINE
2) Install Napster for Windows using WINE
4) Switch to the Napster directory
5) Run napster like this:
wine -dll commctrl,comctl,commdlg,comdlg32=n napster.exe
6) Download away
Its almost entirely functional except the ping feature doesn't seem to work.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Capitalism has nothing to do with free trade - it is a description of how the means of production are owned (capital, in the modern world, as opposed to land in fuedal Europe a few hundred years ago). Whilst it is often convenient for proponents of capitalist systems to conflate free markets with capitalism, there is simply no connection.
If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.
The only ones I've used are nap, gnome-napster, and gnapster. My personal favorite is gnapster, it's really professional and works perfectly for me. I've only used the windows client 1 or 2 times but it didn't impress me half as much as gnapster.
Yes. Glorified IRC client.
/msg on a vanilla IRC client). The querying client may then request a file transfer from whichever client reported a match and seemed the best bet (fewest transfers in progress/fastest link/whatever).
http://www.var.cx/dfsi/ describes the "Distributed Fileserver over IRC project, which appears to have died because of Napster's success.
DFSI, technically, appears to be the better solution: a vanilla IRC server is all that is required on the server side. The web page says that bandwidth usage is heavy, but my brief look at it didn't flag anything that would be significantly more bandwidth-intensive than Napster.
The way it (and Napster) works, is that the client broadcasts a search query on a channel. Other clients on the channel send their matches as a private message (like
I dunno how firewall-friendly IRC file sends are, but other than that I can't see much wrong with it. Certainly better than inventing a new protocol.
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That's right. Open source, Open protocol, the way something with this kind of potential should be. Check out OFSI, the Open File Sharing Initiative. ;)
This idea is to provide a similar service as Napster but with ALL file types. Plus to be better, faster, etc...
Because it's an open project we feel it has better potential, because as many open projects have shown, open projects evolove much quicker and much better.
Sorry for the plug, I just felt this was an opportune time to bring OFSI into some light.
Check it out, help is wanted!
-kidlinux.
When was the last time you strolled the streets of any "big city" (fill in the blank) in the U.S.?
Most of the music cassette and video crap sitting on the tables for sale are pirated.
Most cassettes and videos are pirated? What big city do you live in? You stated somewhere in the US, so that rules out China. I have yet to see one pirated shrink wrap cassette or video. Granted, I have seen taped music in a few homes, but in a retail store? Where do you get this information?
It's pretty common to find pirated videotapes in ma+pa video stores. Are you sure that you know what you are looking for?
Common? In a big city? On the sidewalks? Where do you guys live? As a music aficionado who travelse the Western states about once a month for a week or two at a time, I see lots of drugs, booze, and lots of bodies for sale on the streets, but bootleg copies conviently for sale have not presented themselves to me.
I believe you. Perhaps I was not looking in the right places. My theory was that employees who make incomes at stores who have much invested in the retail market would not be happy at bootleg vendors not playing by the same rules and promptly call for enforcement. They might be upset at someone who is selling a good collection $16 cd's for $4 and call the cops to bust them on one of many of the city's ordinances.
According to the ninth circuit court you have the legal right to load a MP3 of a copyright song that you own on CD. I remember reading that off a link from slashdot, but couldn't find it in slashdot's search, but here is a diffrent summary http://www.nylj.com/tech/091399t3.html, unfortunitly it doesn't really discuss space shifting. As I recall the judge essensally ruled that owning the CD was like owning a "right to use", so owning Ray of Light on CD gave you the right to listen to it in MP3 or other forms. He went on to rule that it didn't matter if you gained the other form from a source that wasn't allowed to listen to it (which I found supprising). I wish I had kept a link to the ruling. Does anyone have one?
MP3.com's "BeamIt" relys on this ruling (as far as I can tell).
So you can't just point to the large number of copyrighted works in Napaster's list, you have to show that the people downloading the songs don't have the legal right to do so!
Of corse free market capitalism regularly produces unsound results. The free market doesn't find global optima, it finds local optima. As far as I know it is the most efficent process known to find local econmic optmia. The only one in fact. There is no known way to find econmic global optima.
You can look at the local optmia that the free market does find, and imagine a better end result, but nobody has shown a process that finds that result for you! Certonally no econ text I have read talks about one. Certonally no non-free market economy seems to be doing better then the mostly-free-merket economies of the world. (I don't know any country that uses a total free market economy, but many are "close enough")
You are very ignorant of the difference between backend and frontend, obviously. Coding a Linux client would involve starting from the ground up - it literally has no similarity to the server. By your logic the same argument could be made for any service. Does the existance of Apache (the "backend") on Linux in any way help along the development of the "client" (browser)? Of course not.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Well, from a practical standpoint, it sounds like he's been really damn busy. This thing literally blew up in his face, yet as he says there are still a ton of problems with his flagship product. Right now he is worried about appeasing the 80-90% of the people who would be on Windows anyways, and to that end he has a lot of work to do. The infrastructure is a mess (I still can't logon during peak hours, 5-9PM), the client sucks (can't even abort a search), and there is a lot to be desired. He feels a very palpable sense of urgency to get these things right before someone else does, which is why he left school, etc. I'm sure that a Linux client is in the works, but there are more important priorities right now. The evolution of ICQ went the exact same way - they spent a good year or two ramping up their servers and creating a better client before they ever bothered with Linux. A Linux napster, by the way, is kind of a moot point, considering that there are 7 or 8 unofficial ones out there already. Some of these work a lot better than the Windows client itself. But for the sake of appearances, I doubt he will forget his Unix roots.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
They mention in the article that Napster is a formal company now, and it appears as though they have employees and the like. My question would be, since napster is free to download, and since you can use the servers for free, how does Napster's corporation make money?
-R
Perhaps Napster should go the way of IRC, and run as multiple servers, e.g. eu.napster.com, us.napster.com, etc. He could then link reliable servers into a small network, allowing for more balanced bandwidth.
It would also mean that individuals could run their own segregated napster networks, for internal usage.
Napster is an incredible innovation! I just wish there was a Stop button when doing a search. The Unix clients still need quite a bit of work as well. Is there a rfc like document for Napster protocols available (so that I could write a perl module or the likes)?
EraseMe
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, unless they change the protocol, and force everyone to upgrade, they can't very well charge me for the old one. Besides, in that unlikly case, we juse make an open source clone. That's pretty much been the standard operating procedure all along.
Finkployd
I would expect using it to exchange certain 'types' of picture files could be potentially more popular than exchanging MP3s.
There is nothing technologically new, or even innovative about napster.
It simply gives the average dork an easy way to start sharing mp3 with everyone, and as some have said, takes certain steps to do things for them (like, not actually shutting down when you hit the close button, just minimizing to the systray and continuing to share).
Napster simply does what us geeks have always done, but in a simpler manner. The only ones who this benefits are those who can't cope otherwise. Those of us with a clue, share things with our friends over standard protocols.
Napster is garbage. The code is garbage. The application is garbage. And all the hype is garbage.
It was simply something written at a time when something of this nature would get lots of attention.
Feh.
I know the trade in DATs is (or was) a huge 'industry' as such, people trading lists of what bootlegs and other stuff they had was very popular...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
iMesh can be used for any type of file. My roommate has already used it to snag several South Park episodes.
For more information, click here.
Off the top of my head...
There must be more... can anyone think of any?
[TMB]
--
The shareholder is always right.
Describing himself as a member of the security community, i can almost see why he was paranoid enough to think a linux client may have been the start of security issues, except for the fact he was more familiar with unix programming to begin with. Out of curiosity why didn't he initially release a *nix client to begin with rather than buying a book and struggling to learn how to program the API under windows? Anyways, Napster is a really great tool despite the bandwith problems it causes, and thats all i have to say aside from complaining how repetitve he was, saying over and over again (i don't know how many times) how they were working on the UI and the scaling of the network.
just my $0.02
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#!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777iX+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
--Ks9
The great thing behind napster is the whole idea, too bad that the implementation is a disaster. I already read complaints about the 'x' not exitting the program, and the lack of an stop button. But the most annoying thing of napster is the fact that you cannot resume a file. When your link hickups you loose connection (protocol problem?) and you can forget the last 5% you had left to complete. $olid
Another RIAA statement I found interesting was that they deem it unacceptable to "build a business" on top of pirating the recording industry. Last time I checked Napster was completely free, and I doubt Napster Inc. has made a cent off of the RIAA let alone anyone else. How can they with no ads or sales of the client? Now, Napster is still in the beta stage yet and may turn shareware or payware, but for the moment there is no business of pirating..it's a free exchange of files.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
While they're at it, why don't they sue the creators of the TCP/IP protocol for creating something that is frequently used to trade illegal files. And sue the postal service because I could burn an MP3 CD and snail mail it to you. Why don't they lobby to get laws passed requiring the entirety of humanity to be isolated in little metal boxes since any communication could lead to the illegal trading of their copyrighted materials?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You must be a drama major.
Capitalism is a process based on the noble process of sharing honest information.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Consider that more Coca-cola gets drank in America than water, and I can't think of a better all around product than water. Why is this so? Marketing.
Coca-cola sells more because it is a better product than water. The important question, of course, is what is the definition of "better". Health-wise, water is probably better. Taste-wise, Coca-cola is better, which is why it sells more. It also has caffeine which many people like to have in their drink of choice. The key word here is "choice".
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
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Napster gets Bob and Joe together, and then Joe sells Bob some crack. Napster is witness to this, and fails to inform the authorities. Napster has violated the law.
There's no such thing as a good samaritan law, despite what you might have seen on Seinfeld. I have no legal obligation to report a crime to the authorities.
The better analogy is that Napster is like manufacturing safe cracking tools. They can be used for legitimate or illegal purposes, but the manufacturer has no obligation to follow every purchaser around to make sure they don't rob anyone.
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But I think the main reason behind closed-source and windows only was because of the "your ad here" banner in the client. An open source version of the software would almost certainly breed a bannerless version, which appears to be where napster was planning on getting their cash from. Just a thought...
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
There's an article in the most recent US News & World Report with "Napster guy" also.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/ issue/000306/napster.htm
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
anyway, I'm glad to see how successful you've been at stopping the Man from limiting my choices about everything from the important to the trivial.
If you (a campus sysop) really want to throttle down the bandwidth used by napster, why don't you install a traffic shaper? A fast x86 with linux will do the trick for a subnet with approx. 200/300 clients.
Ofcourse, users can enter a different data-port, but with a little packet-sniffing the shaper could detect this and limit that users bandwidth.
It really isn't so hard to implement
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
This might stop universities banning the software, just restricting the throttle allowed on-campus.
We ran a leech server from a university campus for a few weeks, and hammered out gigabytes each week ... and shut it down before anyone complained!
This is another case of software development being years ahead of the hardware and infrastructure.
However we need tools like this as the only way bandwidth is going to be improved quickly is when it is made to look inadaquete. Like all other hardware, from CPU's to memory, the fast bandwidth will come along soon and it's arrival will be sped up by these bandwidth killers.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
- "We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities, but that's not what Napster is all about. Napster is about facilitating piracy and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners," said Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel of the RIAA.
For the 1000th time. COPYING is not PIRACY. No matter how many times I say it, it seems that some people just don't get it. Piracy is where you brord a ship, beat the hell out of people or kill them, and then loot their stuff. This isn't even close to copying a CD. For christs sake. Give it UP!!Amen.   And that was the gist of the "VCR" thread, ie., it being so easy and prolific, that the criminality is lost.
Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.
Amen again.   I remember buying my first consumer CD player in 1986.   At that time, there were only 4 CD manufacturers in the world (located in Japan, Germany, and a single one in the U.S.).   The store where I bought the player had a little box that had maybe 10 CD titles in it, with a bunch of duplicates.   That was it.   I reluctantly picked up a Lionel Ritchie CD for US$15 and slinked on home.
The CD industry of 1986 then promised me this:
- "As soon as we get more manufacturers to retool for CDs, the price will drop to the level of record albums, that is, $7.00 per CD"
- "CDs will last forever."
- "CDs don't skip or scratch like records"
- "CDs won't rot or warp like records"
- "CDs will sound better than records"
Then there was all the hullaboo with the AAD and the ADD and DDD (analog recording/mixing/mastering vs digital recording/mixing/mastering) and what sounded better.It's interesting that it's the young folks today who are pushing the mp3s and the Napsters, but tell me why *I* shouldn't support mp3 when I was basically lied to and ripped off by the CD revolution???   Within 5 years, you couldn't find a vinyl record anywhere except maybe a used record store.   So what the industry lost in record sales, they made DOUBLE in CD sales by effectively eliminating the cheaper format.   Seems that payback's a bitch...  
Just adding more to the discussion...  
"
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
The argument that something like Napster foments piracy is the same tired old issue that surfaced with the first reel-to-reels, then the cassette, then the VCR tape, etc.   Yes, there will always be free-loaders.   But is blaming the "engine" that was created for legitimate purposes the way to solve the piracy and copywrite issue?   This is like suing all the cassette recorder manufacturers for promoting piracy.   They tried it at one time and failed.   It'll never happen here either.
.mp3s) and so they make even more $$$ by capturing a wider range of audiences, ie., those who purchase vinyl, cassette, CD, and now mp3.
What usually DOES happen is that the business suddenly realizes that they have a new format to sell (which they have started doing with
The bandwidth issue though, is a concern.   Despite claims to the contrary, the infrastructure out there is not what it should be to handle the increases in streaming media.   More choices of bandwidth providers would certainly bring the costs down for upgrades, but I expect that most sites, particulary at colleges, have gone with their local Bell company at quite a cost.   Perhaps the latest network providers - the fiber providers - may be the answer.   Fiber will certainly offer the bandwidth needed to do this sort of thing.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Those of you out there who use IRC clients such as mIRC, may have noticed that Napster is just an IRC client with its own servers. After all, commands such as /whois and /msg in IRC do the same thing as the commands in Napster's chat rooms, and the downloading/uploading in Napster is the same as the DCC sends and gets of Napster. The only major differences between Napster and IRC are the restriction to Mp3's and the GUI in Napster.
Oh yes, and as a sidenote, Napster is not the only one of it's kind, a program called iMesh is another IRC client with a GUI, but iMesh has 2 major differences; support of audio, video, and still images, and it has fewer users.
-Múñk¥D-
I'm all about choice and freedom. If you believe thats what we have today, I should like to get my glasses tinted the same shade of rose. Just because we begin each ball game by singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" doesn't make it so. The real trick has been to make the general populace believe that's what we have. Pulling that one over on us was quite a coup. Yes, we have choices, as long as they are the ones printed for us by the corporations and federally approved. Theres quite a difference between "freedom of choice" and "freedom from choice". I'm all about choice. I just don't like this mandated menu.
And for the record, I never claimed to believe in a mom and pop utopia. Capitalism in its purest form sounds to me like it would work, much the same as many other ideologies. Unfortunately, we've got this pesky things called human nature to contend with, contaminating most well meaning social endeavors.
As for a golden era, I don't know when America as a country was ever in one. A case could be made, I think, that the last Golden Era was the few years leading up to and including the drafting of the Declaration of Independance and the subsequent Revolutionary War. After that, the lawyers got ahold of it, and most of 'em who couldn't hack the courtroom became politicians.
As for a Golden Era on a world wide scale, I suppose it was just before Homo Sapiens evolved. We've pretty much raped this place.
BTW, what is a gold standard? You mean an ideal? If that's what a gold standard is, sure I long for it. Don't you?
-Jason
In the article, Shawn says "Obviously, a natural extension is to include other types of file formats, things like that. I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files."
This struck an odd chord with me. While distributed storage undoubtedly makes sense, what does it do for the long-term preservation of data? As we move towards distributed storage, don't we place the content more and more under the control of trends and fads?
The web is, in a manner, a type of distributed storage too (I think?), and can maybe serve as a weak demonstration of my concern: When I conduct a search and find a myriad of invalid links, it indicates to me that what I'm searching for is an unpopular topic, and has therefore been eliminated to make room for the newest download that, like the data it has replaced, will also be forgotten in a matter of weeks. One can't blame webmasters for this problem - it takes time and effort even to maintain an archive. If the majority doesn't want the data, why put in all that effort? This extends to commercial sites where that time and effort translate into dollars lost.
One might argue that by bringing shared storage down from the level it is on the web to the level of the individual user in fact makes it less susceptible to these trends, as there has to be at least one other person "out there" that wants to share the data with you. But can I really count on this the next time I want to know about the mating habits of Pseudoceros Bifurcus?
Is any work being done on this problem - if, in fact, it is a problem at all?
Companies and universities don't need to up their bandwidth when it's being used for activities that aren't in line with people job or education requirements... Why should they?
"We need to upgrade from our T-1's to T-3's because our employees insist on listening to music."
No. They can just say "our new policy is that if you want to listen to music here, please bring your CD's... we don't have the resources to allow for people to stream audio through our network"
But is so much easier to sell a pretty product with promises and use that money to make it better than it is to create a very high quality product that makes its money through repeat buying and reputation for quality. (just to play bil^H^H^Hdevil's advocate. (-;)
'Course this is a good reason why the OSS developement model works good. The quality is built by people who use it and really care. Because there is no money involved, nothing is rushed, cruft can be easily discarded, and programs -work-. Then later the marketers come along and get to add all the shiny happy buttons, but they are basically left to stand or fall based on their ability to appeal to the peole who need and depend on friendly goo-E's.
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+&x
An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.
Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!
Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)
So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.
Is Napster going to eat into CD sales? Absolutely--and I believe that the end result is going to be a lot of pruning in the industry. Hopefully, the end result is going to be a dramatic drop in CD prices before they lose totaly control over music distribution.
Knowing this, I was a little surprised when I read to following in the ZDnet article:
Now this is weird. A true unix-developper creates a windows program (ok, that is possible
Strange
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--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Gnapster
gnome-napster
GTK Napster
iNapster
jNapster
Knapster
Linux Napster Client
Jnap
OpenNap
;)
Would anyone like to throw some review of the different Napster implementations available for Linux? Or should I just run Napster over VMWare?
EraseMe
What really tickles my toenails about this article, is how the author of napster keeps harping on 'Prettying Up' the client.. even though he knows that there are major issues with how stable/efficient the infrastructure underneath is.
As a professional GUI designer, this type of problem runs across my desk a lot. Marketing maniacs push and push a product to market as fast as (in)humanly possible. They don't really care if the program actually functions, they just want it to look fancy and have a lot of useless features. (HOT LINKS!! WTF?!?)
This is a common trend in the software business today.. and it REALLY has to stop.
Less features; better programs. Everybody (well, everybody but the management) is happy.
Don't mind me, I just had a GUI change thrust into my lap by a certain clueless manager. IT'S ART DAMN YOU!
--
rJames.org - illustration
Someone said making napster illegal would be like making (among other things) the USENET illegal. The problem with this analogy is there isn't the same level of direct culpability with regards to the USENET as there is with Napster. The USENET is a far larger and amorphous entity than Napster is. Who would you find liable for file trading on the USENET?...The USENET isn't a product of a given company like napster is...
Another analogy was made to VHS and cassette tapes. I would say this isn't the best analogy but instead think of "video stabalizers" or "cable decoder boxes". So called video stabalizers have long been used to try to break copy protection in copying a tape from one VCR to another. Similarly, cable decoder/descrambler boxes have long been used to circumvent the cable companies scrambling. Now, the problem here, and with napster, is that all three products have the possibility and potential to be used in a completely legal manner. If I am working on a video project on some crappy old VCR, I might use a video stabalizer to improve my image quality; if I by accident knock my cable box off my TV and break it and want a new one without wanting to pay the cable company, I may just choose to go buy one from a shop down the street. Similarly, if I am an independent music producer (some small indie band or whatnot), I may choose to try to use napster and it's chat rooms to promote my band by giving away free samples...
Legally the question becomes then not can the product be used for legal purposes, but what is it most likely to be used for. And this is where the law gets REALLY hairy. Then, "intent" has to be proven, which is a mess in and of itself, and it gets crazy. Two perfect examples though are syringes and "burgalarious tools". If you are caught in a drug bust, or whatever, it is against the law to carry a syringe without a valid reason why (at least this is true in Massachussetts...some MIT students recently got in trouble for just this (amongst other things)). Also, if you are caught breaking into a house and you have a bag of hammers, screwdrivers, etc. (esp., lockpicks!), you can be cited for illegal possession of "burgalarious tools". In both these instances, the person is usually caught doing something else, and these are secondary charges the cops like to tack on additionally, but still, a good example of how something completely legal can be found to be illegal.
It's scary, I know...
Now, departing from the legal side, Napster has technical problems galore (still being so new). Here's just a couple complaints:
- Multiple servers that don't communicate, and yet provide no notice to the user that there are in fact multiple servers nor which server they are on
- Search queries that can't be aborted
- Lots of firewall problems
- Lots of connection issues
- Lots of UI problems (like I can't look at what files someone has without explicitly adding them to my hotlist)
But hopefully, these will all be sorted out in later versions...so I strongly hope napster is around for a while yet!And now on to the article...first, I was amused to see this sentence in the second paragraph:
"At a time when the MP3 industry is under fire from multiple directions, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has filed a lawsuit against the small start-up company out of San Mateo, California, known as Napster. "
So there's an MP3 "industry" now, is there?...heh...
And here's a bold lie by the RIAA:
"We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities"
Yes, when it's a community around an artist that already is well set in the industry...new small artists not really interested in the RIAA? Uhuh. No way...The RIAA is not only not interested in them, it doesn't like them! They are potentially dangerous!
And here's a misnomer on Shawn's part too:
"I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific".
Well, no. Currently, it is. It doesn't have to be, is what I think he's trying to say, and eventually won't be, but currently, yes, it is.
But in general, I don't think this article really says anything new. Big companies hate it, small individuals like it, and so it goes as per usual... Interestingly, Jon Katz was recently at MIT and stated this was an excellent example of how Geeks and young smart computer kids have usurped the "Corporatism" that exists today. I wondered about one point he made: he mentioned corporatism was different than capitalism, but I just don't see how?...